n his face.

"You made me brush off a nigger's hat when you had the drop on me, and
carry a post five miles. That's the shoulder I carried it on!"

He drove his knife into Lambert's right shoulder with the words. The
steel grated on bone.

"I brushed a nigger off under your gun one time," said old Nick Hargus,
spurring up on the other side. "Now I'll brush you a little!"

Lambert felt the hot streak of a knife-blade in the thick muscle of his
back. Almost at the same moment his horse leaped forward so suddenly
that it wrenched every joint in his bound, stiff body, squealing in
pain. He knew that one of them had plunged a knife in the animal's
haunch. There was loud laughter, the sudden rushing of hooves, yells,
and curses as they came after him.

But no shots. For a moment Lambert hoped that they were to content
themselves with the tortures already inflicted and let him go, to find
his way out to help or perish in his bonds, as it might fall. For a
moment only, this hope. They came pressing after him, heading his horse
directly toward the fire. He struggled to bring pressure to old
Whetstone's ribs in the signal that he had answered a thousand times,
but he was bound so rigidly that his muscles only twitched on the bone.

Whetstone galloped on, mad in the pain of his wound, heading straight
toward the fire.

Lambert believed, as those who urged him on toward it believed, that no
horseman ever rode could jump that fiery gorge. On the brink of it his
pursuers would stop, while he, powerless to check or turn his horse,
would plunge over to perish in his bonds, smothered under his struggling
beast, pierced by the transcendent agonies of fire.

This was the last thought that rose coherently out of the turmoil of his
senses as the firepit opened before his eyes. He heard his horse squeal
again in the pain of another knife thrust to madden it to its
destructive leap. Then a swirl of the confused senses as of released
waters, the lift of his horse as it sprang, the heat of the fire in his
face.

The healthy human mind recoils from death, and there is no agency among
the destructive forces of nature which threatens with so much terror as
fire. The senses disband in panic before it, reason flees, the voice
appeals in its distress with a note that vibrates horror. In the threat
of death by fire, man descends to his primal levels; his tongue speaks
again the universal language, its note lending its horrified thrill to
th